From Too Many Chefs - www.toomanychefs.com

September 1, 2004

Eating an Elephant

After watching television this week, I had the odd desire to cook an elephant. The Joy of Cooking, normally a dependable source for all manners of recipes, had nothing to say on the topic. At first, Google only gave me false leads.

I found a recipe for a Pink Elephant, a cocktail composed of gin and grenadine. Another site told me how to bake Elephant Ears, a cinnamon and sugar cookie. The first recipe, though, sounded like an abuse of good gin. The second seemed better suited to, as some would say, "girlie men."

Finally, at a place called the Congo Cookbook, I discovered a wealth of information on eating elephants, whose meat a 19th-century cookbook described as "fat and juicy." The author of that book warns, though, that the meat "should be taken from the body without delay; as, if left for a few hours, it partakes of the peculiar smell of the elephant, which no amount of boiling will overcome."

My local butcher, unfortunately, doesn't carry elephant meat. Rumor has it, though, that a herd of elephants has gathered somewhere in the Northeast of the United States.

You could check New York's delis - "How about a nice MLT - a mastadon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich - when the mastadon is sliced real thin? Mmm yum yum yummm."

This reminds me of one of the short stories Laurence Durrell wrote about his time in the diplomatic corps (either Esprit de Corps or Stiff Upper Lip, don't have my library handy) where a dip goes irredeemably wrong when he discovers that ANYTHING can be made into a gourmet meal. It's a very funny comment on the diplomatic corps...